Scientific discovery and self discovery

Senior physics major Emily Batt presents her work to graduate student David Xu at last week's College of Science Co-op Expo.

Emily Batt can sketch a design for a new product in the morning, create a com­puter model by midday and have a working pro­to­type gen­er­ated by a 3-​​D printer in the evening. Since she started working at Fikst Product Devel­op­ment in Woburn, Mass., Batt has been involved in the design, devel­op­ment and testing of dozens of prod­ucts.

But Batt isn’t a vet­eran employee of the com­pany. She’s a co-​​op stu­dent who started her job just over three months ago.

“It’s my final co-​​op, and it really feels like a cul­mi­na­tion of all my expe­ri­ences at North­eastern,” said Batt, a senior physics major who has pre­vi­ously engaged in expe­ri­en­tial learning at Oregon State Uni­ver­sity, the Dana-​​Farber Cancer Insti­tute and the MIT Media Lab. “It really ties in a lot of dif­ferent fields of sci­ence — not just physics, my major – plus there’s the whole design com­po­nent. It feels like I’ll be really ready for a career once I grad­uate.”

Batt was one of 16 stu­dents from Northeastern’s Col­lege of Sci­ence who pre­sented work and research from their co-​​op jobs in an annual expo­si­tion held last week in the Curry Stu­dent Center Ball­room.

The stu­dents at the expo rep­re­sented a broad range of sci­ences, from a psy­chology stu­dent who worked in a down­town Boston law firm to a pre-​​med stu­dent who worked in a hos­pital in Tan­zania.

“The ring of things our stu­dents are doing is really broad and very, very impres­sive,” said Jordan Keefe, the Col­lege of Science’s director of stu­dent ser­vices. “It shows that our stu­dents are so well-​​prepared by their course­work that, even on a first co-​​op, they are able to par­tic­i­pate and con­tribute right away like they’re a full-​​time hire who has com­pleted a degree.”

Co-​​op jobs help stu­dents find out what they are pas­sionate about, helping to shape their aca­d­emic and pro­fes­sional futures, said Pam Mabrouk, asso­ciate dean for aca­d­emic affairs and a pro­fessor of chem­istry and chem­ical biology in the Col­lege of Sci­ence.

“One of the things I get the biggest kick out of at events like this is seeing our stu­dents describe their ‘aha!’ moments — that instance when they dis­cov­ered exactly what they want to be doing,” Mabrouk said. “With co-​​op, they are able to know what they want to do. You put stu­dents in a real expe­ri­ence and they can really see what it’s like to have a career as a scientist.”

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